France

The Paris-based Museum of Music keeps archives from luthiers, instrument makers and musicians. Several hundreds of these documents are now accessible online. These archives testify to evolutions both in instrument-making and in the musical scene during the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, they comprise registers from Érard, Pleyel and Gaveau, from Nicolas Lupot, Gand and Bernardel’s instrument-making workshops, and they also include substantial correspondence between luthiers Chanot and Chardon. The main part of these archive collections - comprising extremely fragile documents, sometimes in poor condition - was digitized and uploaded for safe-keeping and accessibility purposes, as testimony.

The Music Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France has just incorporated the information from its old card catalogue (authors/composers/anonymous) into the online general catalogue http://catalogue.bnf.fr.

This covers holdings entered into the catalogues of the library from the sixteenth century through 1991, when the card catalogue was closed.

Update from Laurence Decobert: